


The Fall of the House of Funso

by PartlyCloudySkies



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Competitive wages at least, Gen, I bet Duckburg is expensive, It's not as dramatic as the title suggests, Pizza, Time Travel, does F.O.W.L. have job benefits?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:01:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28510854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PartlyCloudySkies/pseuds/PartlyCloudySkies
Summary: Pepper throws a pizza party and nearly destroys F.O.W.L.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 26





	The Fall of the House of Funso

Bradford sat at his desk and glowered over his steepled fingers at the device on the opposite side. The chair typically set there had been put aside and in its place was a tripod that held up a complicated little gadget, a bristling nest of antennae and wires and a row of light diodes that blinked, red and erratic. There was a static energy in the room, and sound was drowned out by an electric hum. Arcs of crackling blue-white energy sparked in the air around the device, twisting lightning traces that looked like claws grasping at the air.

The Time Anchor was a recent innovation, salvaged from the computers of the St. Canard labs in the wake of that whole miserable debacle. It was simple in design. The Eggheads only needed a page of instructions to set it up. Yet its capabilities were... profound.

It sifted through the time stream or whatever medium it was that time travelers moved through. And like a filter it found the things that didn’t belong and caught it. Specifically, the things that belonged to the moment in time the Time Anchor existed in. Things tended to seek out the places where and when they belonged. The anchor simply helped that process along.

And really, wasn’t that proof enough that the world desired a certain order? Everything in its place and its time? Bradford hated time travel. Just another way for the world to become chaotic and disarrayed.

The anchor flared with energy, the tripod rocking on its three legs as jolts of energy struck the device. The air was filled with a burning scent of ozone and a current of air whipped around the office, pulling at the framed pictures on the wall and lifting away stray papers on Bradford’s desk.

Then the arcs of tiny lightning gathered into a single great bolt, that instead of splitting Bradford’s ceiling open, blossomed into the glowing eye of an angry storm. The eye gained depth, stretching into a dimension otherwise impossible to perceive. The anchor reaching through reality.

And it pulled Black Heron back into her time.

And she brought someone with her.

Heron landed roughly on her chin before rolling to her side just as a sword flashed down, piercing the space she had occupied moments before and rendering Bradford’s good rug unsalvageable. A duck in heavy plate armor that concealed their features hefted the heavy sword out of the rug and swung at Heron, who skipped nimbly back.

“Agent Heron,” Bradford said dryly. He observed the fight with the dispassionate interest of a detached observer. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

“Busy, Bradford!” Heron panted out. She took a wide stance and made a flicking motion with her prosthetic arm. Her wrist blade snapped out with a metallic _chunk_ and she swung it up to parry the knight’s downward slice. She pushed the sword away, the blade gouging another rip into the rug. She kicked at the knight’s midsection to little effect, though she sprung away, putting distance between them.

“Enough of this,” said Bradford. He stood up and reached across his desk to the anchor and flipped a switch. The portal flashed. Lightning shot from its depths and clawed at the knight, electricity skittering over their plate armor like countless tiny hands that dragged Heron’s foe bodily into the air and then into the portal.

Then the portal closed, leaving Heron and Bradford alone in silence.

Clearing her throat and smoothing down the wrinkles in her red dress, Black Heron arched an eyebrow and gave Bradford a haughty, unimpressed look. As if _he_ were the one who had been responsible for the commotion.

“Director,” she said, catching her breath. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“This is _my_ office.”

“And what a dowdy office it is. Have I ever told you that a splash of color would do wonders for this place?”

That was about as far as Bradford was willing to keep this charade up. “Heron! Do you have any idea how much time and resources I —”

“Worried for me, Bradford?” Heron said. She slid up to his desk and sat primly atop it, crossing her legs. “I’m touched, but you needn’t be. I had it all well in hand.”

“You impulsively activated a time portal with no idea of when or where you’d end up!”

“England during the House of Stuart, if you were curious,” Heron said idly.

“Where is the device that sent you there?”

Heron waved her hand as if brushing off a trifling detail. “Destroyed. It appears it was meant to be a one-way ticket.”

“And you just used it without checking?” Frustration and indignation warred in Bradford’s voice before he stopped himself and massaged his throbbing temple. Was it possible for one’s skull to push itself out through one’s forehead? It seemed as if he was finding out.

“I trusted a path back would present itself, Bradford.”

“Reckless.” He grumbled. “At least that’s one less dangerous artifact for Scrooge or some other maniac to find.” 

“I concur!” Heron said. “Well done, me.”

“Maniacs like you! I expect a full report, Agent.”

“Oh come on, _Director_ ,” the word dripped from Heron’s mouth like an insult. She never did like when he put an emphasis on her rank. She had always considered herself an equal partner. “This was all hardly worth mentioning. An advanced artifact seemingly built from unknown materials found in an archaeological dig site of a neolithic community that couldn’t possibly have created it? What’s there to report?”

“The devil is in the details, Heron! Something that might seem trivial now could be vitally important in the future. We must keep the big picture in mind.”

Heron groaned and sprawled over his desk, eyes closed and head lolling as if lifeless. Bradford rolled his eyes at the dramatics and pushed away on his office chair, its wheels skating over the floor.

“Shall I get you a pen and paper once you’re done with this performance, Agent?”

“You know Bradford, when you broke me out of that prison so many years ago I thought you’d be more exciting.” Heron said with a scowl. She opened one eye to glare at him.

“I didn’t do that to be exciting,” Bradford said primly. “It was a decision reached through rigorous calculations and scenarios. I am not —”

“Given to impulsive behavior, yes yes.” Heron cast her eyes ceilingward until her gaze landed on Bradford again. She smirked. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

“I am not one of your —”

“Dime a dozen supervillains,” Heron completed for him.

Bradford scowled.

“You could be,” Heron said. She turned herself over and rested her chin in her hands. Her metal hand, still damaged from her last foray, whined, its tiny gears grinding. “You’d make a good one.”

“I have a bigger picture in mind and if the rest of you had any sense, so would you.”

“Dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no cake and ale?” Heron said in a sing-song voice, one hand to her collarbone as if she were doing a soliloquy on stage. “Guess whose show I saw while I was in ye olde times, by the way.”

“Stop meddling with time and stop being so ridiculous.”

“I’ll stop being ridiculous when you stop being predictable, Bradford.” Heron hauled herself up and off the desk and, with a theatrical gesture, sauntered out the room. “There’s more than the big picture, you know. There’s such a thing as loving what you do.”

“A report, Heron!” Bradford shouted after her. The office door slid open as she approached it. A rectangle of bright light as she stood between his dark office and the harshly lit gunmetal gray corridor of FOWL’s secret facility. A steady stream of Eggheads marched down the hallway and Heron pushed her way into the foot traffic. The door slid shut behind her.

Bradford sighed and drummed his fingers on his desk.

* * *

It was one of those classic blunders, where practical needs were set aside for the sake of aesthetic appeal, but FOWL’s secret command center had an entire floor dedicated to meeting rooms.

Very likely it looked nice on the blueprints: seven rooms arranged radially from the central spine of the elevator shaft that ran up and down the subterranean base. In reality, it led to a lot of unnecessary congestion as agents from various departments got in each other’s way while heading to the latest briefing or debriefing. The elevators saw extra use as a result and broke down routinely.

So when a surprise All Hands On Deck meeting showed up on the priority Egghead announcement board there was a groan of collective despair. Eggheads left their workstations to make their way to the meeting level.

Usually an All Hands was only called during an emergency, and since nothing was visibly on fire, rumors spread in the packed hallways.

“Anybody know what this is about?”

“Steelbeak’s got a mission today. He’s probably recruiting.”

“Is it really that important? Only I was supposed to monitor the reactor coolant…”

“Doesn’t he already have a team?”

“This is his fourth team, guy burns through minions fast.”

“… coolant sensor’s been real squirrelly lately so if this isn’t a big deal then maybe…”

“Could you not call us ‘minions?’ I have a _Master’s degree_.”

“… I wouldn’t have come except it’s an All Hands but someone should really check…”

“What would you prefer? Henchman? Hired thug?”

“I’ve been putting ‘professional assistant’ on my resumes.”

“You’re sending out resumes?”

“… I mean someone has to monitor the cooling vents, last time we didn’t…”

“Uh, yeah? I’m not going to be a minion my whole life.”

“Look I was a software engineer I am not going to be called a minion!”

“Yeah? Why are you here then?”

“Where else am I going to get a decent healthcare plan and affordable housing in this city?”

“Yeah congrats you’re a minion.”

“I think I like hired thug, makes me sound tough. Oh! What about mercenary?”

“… anyway I left a rubber band to hold the vent lever open so we’re probably safe but still —”

“Is that pizza?”

Only the leading group of Eggheads could fit into the designated meeting room, built to fit a long, dark oak table polished to gleam in that really classy CEO boardroom type of way, which was somewhat undercut by the piles of Funzos Pizza boxes stacked on top of it, leaking grease over the surface. Multicolored plastic balls rolled and fell onto meeting chairs. A single person stood at the head of the table.

“Is that —”

Pepper clapped her hands together as she stood on the table. “Hey everyone, thanks for coming! Pull up a chair! Have a slice of something!” She knelt down and lifted up a compact CD player by its plastic handle, setting it on the table. “What kind of tunes you guys like? Well, doesn’t matter I brought the best party mixes.”

The assembled Eggheads looked on as she stood back up and gestured to the pizza spread with a flourish.

“Pepper, please,” said the lead Egghead. The extra orange stripe on his forearm marked him as a shift supervisor, though that never meant much to any non-Egghead in FOWL. In the end they were all minions. Wearing the stripe just meant that he was the first one to catch heat from one of the Agents whenever something went wrong and his voice was heavy with the exhaustion of someone who had caught plenty of heat. “This was supposed to be my lunch break.”

“Lucky for you I brought plenty of pizza!”

“Where are you getting these from?”

Pepper pointed up. Above them, a transport tube from Funso’s was extended down from the ceiling. There was a mechanical click and the tube opened. A pizza box and a small shower of plastic balls fell onto the table.

“I’ve never had a pizza before,” said a smaller Egghead, a bit pale and trembly.

“We’re above a Funzo’s,” said Pepper. “How could you not have pizza?”

“There’s… there’s something _above_ us?!”

“Ha ha, funny joke friend, you nearly —” Pepper squinted at the little Egghead and the division indicator on their uniform. “Oh, you’re in Accounting. You poor soul.”

The others made some space around the twitchy little Egghead. The ones from Accounting, it was said, do not get out much, and the dark cubicle complex where they work contains no sharp objects, to prevent Incidents. They were hand picked by Bradford and put to work shuffling money around so that FOWL could hide its existence from the world’s most notorious miser while simultaneously funding its operations with his accounts. It didn’t take long for someone crunching numbers under those conditions to start to see the world in a... sideways kind of way.

“Somebody get them a paper plate,” Pepper said gently. “And _do not give them any utensils, not even the plastic ones_.”

“Why are you doing this?” said the lead Egghead.

“To celebrate, silly!” said Pepper. “You all said it couldn’t be done, but da-dada-daaaa!” She pushed a pizza box aside and picked a tablet up off the table, wiped some grease off its surface and presented it with the flourish of an artist presenting her magnum opus.

“That’s our duty roster,” said the lead Egghead.

“Look closerrrr,” Pepper sang, pushing the tablet into his face.

Eggheads were going out on missions more often now that the Director was actively chasing down artifacts. They were meant to accompany Agents on the field, where they would do the thankless work of field support on top of managing the raging egos of supervillains, encountering supernatural and technological monstrosities with little training and more often than not, get foiled by children who came up to their knees.

These missions were scheduled on duty rosters like the one Pepper held up. Grids of names and times. Pepper pointed at her name, then the name next to it.

“Pepper and the Blot,” read the lead Egghead. “Like last time?”

“Wait, this is for real,” said another Egghead, who pointed. “Look, she didn’t write her name directly on the screen using whiteout.”

There was a murmuring among everyone in the room as Pepper posed dramatically. The murmur rippled back to the Eggheads outside the meeting room.

“Blot legit _requested_ you?” said an Egghead further back in the crowd.

“And you all said it couldn’t be done!” Pepper bounced on her feet.

“Are you crazy?”

“Aw he’s not so bad! I’ve been telling you guys! But it’s a good thing you didn’t listen to me cuz you know what this means!”

There was a collective groan in the meeting room.

“You won the bet,” said an Egghead.

“I won the bet!” Pepper said.

It had seemed like a sure bet and a guaranteed source of entertainment, betting against Pepper actually being acknowledged by the Phantom Blot. His interactions with his co-workers and underlings ranged from an antisocial growl to a zap from his ridiculous magic glove. But she had tenacity in her that most people overlooked.

“It’s just a duty roster!” another Egghead objected.

“Agents sign off on their partners and that’s what Blot did,” said the lead Egghead.

“And that counts?”

“It’s about as close as we can get. Unless Pepper here went and made matching friendship bracelets or something silly like… oh.”

Everyone looked as Pepper proudly held up her forearm for all to see, where a multicolored woven bracelet hung slack on her heavy work glove. The lead Egghead grunted.

“I’m not going to bother to check. Okay, Pepper wins the pot.”

“Don’t worry friends, party pizza for all to celebrate my victory!” Pepper said proudly.

“This is an abuse of the All Hands signal Pepper!”

“No it isn’t, I filed a report and everything!”

“We have duty stations —”

“And I have pizza!”

“I… want pizza…” said the accounting Egghead, vibrating in place. The other nearby shuffled cautiously away.

“I think we better at least have a _small_ pizza party before the little guy explodes,” Pepper said.

Mollified and slightly unnerved, the rest nodded.

“Great!” said Pepper. She jabbed at the play button of her CD player. “Now turn up the music!”

* * *

“Look, just… turn it off and turn it back on okay? I have another call.”

Gandra Dee hung up the phone and wheeled her chair to the other side of a large, semicircular desk that sat in the middle of FOWL’s cavernous command center. She was alone against a barrage of ringing phones. She grit her teeth and picked up the nearest one.

“Yeah what the hell do you want? The reactor -- well watch the coolant levels! This isn’t hard. Just open the flood gates and dump the water from the bay into the coolant pipes. The design is pretty simple! Well… just turn it off and turn it back on again, then open the gates. I’ve got other calls.” She slammed the receiver down. Then for good measure she opened the drawer underneath and swept the entire phone into it and slammed the drawer closed.

She was about to offer the next phone similar treatment when she saw the name blinking on its display. “Great,” she hissed as she picked up a line with Steelbeak’s number.

“Hey nerd, where are all the other nerds?”

“Don’t ask me!” Dee shouted. “None of the Eggheads are here and for some reason everyone thinks that means _I’m_ tech support for this entire dumb operation!”

“Yeah I didn’t listen to any of that. I need someone to do the wall mounts for all my electric guitars. Where are they?”

“Uhhhhh, I don’t know? I don’t keep track of what they do. You don’t even play guitar.”

“No but they look sick on a wall. Hey, go find ‘em and send some my way, cool? And do something about all those sirens or whatever. They’re annoying.”

“I am not the one in charge of running this dump and I’m definitely not the Egghead wrangler! Hey! Don’t you hang up on me --” Dee slumped back into her seat when she was answered by the dial tone. She groaned as she stared up at the ceiling. She should just leave for the day. Nobody would notice. Nothing’s getting fixed. And could she hear music? It was coming out of the vents or the walls or something. Someone out there was having a better time than she was, and she hated it.

She needed to… smash all the phones. Right now. This seemed like a rational response to all this. Smash all the phones and tear out the alarms that were starting to pile up and punch the first person she saw.

The reinforced steel doors of the control center slid open. Dee tilted her head to look and groaned. Rockerduck.

“Thundering bedevilment, where the dickens is the help? Hello? Blast this botheration, who builds a place like this without staffing it appropriately? Besides me?” Rockerduck in his white suit stood out in the dimly lit control center, as out of place as the man himself. Dee watched with the detached interest of someone watching an ungainly creature in a nature documentary as Rockerduck approached a workstation as if it were going to come alive and eat him. He poked at one of the chairs. “Are these _chairs_? Are they allowed? What nonsense! If we permit our underlings to… to… _relax_ then how can we expect them to stay on task? Sitting in this day and age, _really_.”

Dee reflexively amped up the charge on her bioelectric taser. It really was a shame she hadn’t worked out a way to project it from a distance yet. Maybe he wouldn’t notice her. She ducked under the desk. This was about the last person she wanted to hear from.

Then the phones started up again. Dee winced.

“Criminy, how am I supposed to hear myself complain in this — oh ho! Finally! You there!”

Dee winced and emerged from under the desk.

“Oh, it’s you. The youngster.” Rockerduck didn’t bother hiding his disappointment.

“What do you want?” Dee said.

“What do I want? Shouldn’t it be obvious? I want the elevators elevating! I had to _walk_ up here! Intolerable!”

“Talk to the Eggheads,” Dee said. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t even think about how you saw me here. I don’t exist. Go away.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re sitting — guh, _sitting_ — at some kind of conglomeration of buttons and levers. Push buttons! Do whatever tomfoolery you do to make this place work!”

Dee sighed and rolled her eyes. “Look, Rockerduck? You’re a lot to deal with right now, so I’m actually going to ignore you, cool? Cool.” She pulled her headphones up and activated them. Turn up the music and ignore the outside world. How had she gone this long without thinking of this brilliant idea?

She turned away from Rockerduck where he stood and fumed. She activated a monitor and started flipping through security feeds. Somewhere out there, someone was having a party and she wanted in.

And Rockerduck, because he had more entitlement than good sense, _touched_ her.

When he gripped her shoulder to get her to face him, a bioelectric charge strong enough to put him on the ground discharged straight to his body. There was the smell of burnt feathers in the air. Dee, unphased, looked down at him as he lay collapsed in a heap. Little blue sparks leaped off the frame of his glasses.

“Not the smartest choice you made,” she said.

“If… my minions were here, this wouldn’t have happened,” Rockerduck groaned.

“Yes it would.”

“It wouldn’t happen to _me_. Where are those layabouts? Those little people with their little lives?”

“They have names, you know.”

“Oh? And do you know what their names are?”

“Ugh. No.”

Rockerduck looked exceedingly pleased with himself. Nobody who just got electrocuted should look so smug immediately after. “I thought not. And why should you? Why, I bet they don’t even have anyone to cut their steak dinners for them.”

“No, most people who aren’t children don’t.”

“More the fool they, eh?”

Dee shook her head and stood up, her chair rolling backwards. “You know what? This conversation became stupid the instant it started. If you’re not leaving, then I am.”

“Hah! A pre-warmed seat. John D. Rockerduck triumphs again.”

“Creep.”

“Hm, what do we have here on this telegramatic visualizer?” Rockerduck said as he sat down and rolled up to the monitor. He turned a dial, the sound of the mechanical click audible over the near constant ringing of unanswered phones. “Ah,” he said. “So that’s where those ragamuffins went.”

“Wait, you found them?” Dee pushed him away to his ignored objections and looked for herself at the low-resolution image of Eggheads crowded into the largest meeting room. “Are they… what are they doing?”

“Rabblerousing no doubt,” Rockerduck said. “No good comes from the help gathering around like that. Discussing things. _Thinking_ things. Forgetting their place.”

“Could you stop being a weird jackass for like, five seconds and let me look?”

“Bah! We’ve no time to waste. Where’s the button that lets me eject the module they’re all loitering in?”

“Rockerd— _How?_ How do you know that’s an option? I’ve seen you get confused by a refrigerator.”

“Unlike you, I am a natural, superior _executive_. There isn’t a leader born who doesn’t have a plan to eject his minions into the sea. Or a volcano. Or the firmament. Believe you me, the button that allows me to do so is here somewhere. Ah, I believe this is it.”

“How do you know that?” Dee’s voice went up several octaves.

“Well it says ‘eject’ right there, doesn’t it? Jeeves, push the button for me.”

“What?”

“Oh, yes. I keep forgetting he’s miniature now. No matter. I suppose I’ll do it myself.”

“No wait, I think they’re just having a… a… pizza party or something! What, is it someone’s birthday?”

“And pushed!” Rockerduck said. There was an electronic beep in acknowledgment.

“Oh, hell,” Dee said. She braced herself as she felt the entire facility shudder.

* * *

It was the last agonizing hour of Jane’s shift when she felt the entire Funzos rock beneath her feet. She braced herself against a fake palm tree that swayed alarmingly overhead. Around her, customers squawked in alarm, scrabbling at their tables and arcade booths.

The shaking subsided as suddenly as it started. And after a few moments of stillness, there was a collective sigh as the momentary fear passed. Jane pushed herself away from the palm tree. That was Duckburg. It took more than a brief earthquake to raise any real alarm. Anyone inclined to lose their head at a tremor or an explosion or a monster attack or a robot army didn’t last long in this city. Time to get back to work. 

Jane was in that homestretch that seemed to go on for an eternity. Only two kids had thrown up today, so it had been a pretty average shift but it was... a weird one.

And it was all because of the mascot.

Despite the best efforts of shitty parents, snotty kids, awful bosses, food safety violations, failing equipment and the occasional monster attack or whatever, Jane stayed on at Funso’s. By now she was a grizzled veteran. The pay was hot garbage but at this point in for a penny in for a pound. The point was, she had seen a lot.

But this new mascot guy was weird.

For one thing, he never took his costume off. _Ever_. It was sweaty work. Jane had to take her turn inside that thing during emergency situations, so she knew. But this guy _never_ took the suit off. Which was great because now she never had to put the hellish thing on. But how could he endure being in that thing? It _smelled_.

Even though he never told anybody his real name and insisted on going by ‘Funso,’ he was never in character. He glowered, which was hard to tell behind the mascot’s big blank eyes, but you could feel it. Like a physical force radiating from under the mask. And like, Jane understood. Really. This job sucked out your soul and exchanged it for Funso arcade tickets. But the dude needed to find it in him to dial it down. He was scaring the kids.

And then that weird birthday magician just up and quit and he _flipped out_. Or at least he just got even moodier. Jane didn’t know what the deal was with those two and didn’t want to know. Workplace gossip bummed her out. But she was pretty sure he… hated her or something. But now that she was gone he seemed even more unbearable. It was another headache, but it was manageable. It wasn’t like he was the only person working in Funso’s who had to smile while angry as hell.

But now…

Jane didn’t know what the hell was going on now. For the thousandth time today she found herself distracted as she watched him toss another pizza into the ball pit.

She didn’t care. She was past caring. Earlier today some kid’s mom had stomped on her foot. Like. Deliberately. Because Jane had refused to pay for arcade tokens out of her own pocket.

“I’m a customer aren’t I? Don’t you want my business? You can make it back in tips! Stop being selfish!”

And then she _stepped on Jane’s foot_. It didn’t hurt, but… really? Really? It was hardly the worst thing that happened to her in Funso’s. It wasn’t even the worst thing this day. Jane had years of indignities from this place that would probably stick with her until she died.

So Jane didn’t care. She wasn’t paid to care. Nobody told her what to do in a situation like this. So she did nothing. She watched Funso sneak out of the kitchen, tiptoe down the steps and sidle up to the ball pit where he threw the pizza, box and all, down into the rainbow spew of plastic balls. Just shoved it all deep down. Was this some kind of job revenge? Jane had seen it before. Powerless workers breaking the rules just to feel like they’re in control of their fates. Hell, she did it. She had this charming little kid come in and ‘bribe’ her with Funso tokens as if that meant anything so he could get dumb perks like free soda. She let him do it. It was kind of fun.

This was a weird kind of revenge, though. And a good way to get a rat infestation. Maybe she could get a few days off while the place got fumigated. It was impossible for her to ignore the way he moved across the open floor like he was being stealthy. Nobody else seemed to notice but that was mainly because everyone was so distracted. The employees were running around, the manager was doing something for once and dealing with a birthday party that had gone bad, all the parents were preoccupied.

A few kids did notice, but nobody was listening to them. Jane watched as a greasy little kid went up to Funso, expecting to be entertained. Funso palmed his entire face with one giant glove and shoved him aside. Jane smiled at that. It was awful. But she still smiled.

And he pushed another pizza down into the ball pit.

Jane worked her last hour, distracted and fascinated and wondering what all this meant. Maybe she’d be lucky and Funso, who had clearly snapped, would burn the place down and tomorrow morning she would come back to a smoldering pier. Fantasies like that made sleepless nights bearable.

The very second the minute hand ticked over, Jane bee-lined for the employee break room, eyes forward, avoiding the attention of any customers. In a few moments, she emerged, dressed in her casual clothes and feeling almost human. She loved this moment at the end of her shift. It felt like a great weight lifted off her shoulders. The worries of Funso’s fell from her thoughts as if a vault door had been closed on them. The mascot’s antics fell from her thoughts and the weird tremor too. That was no longer a Jane problem. At least until tomorrow.

Jane breathed deep the air from the pier, heard the intermingling of seagull cries and honking horns, and put her back to Funso’s for another night.

* * *

Bradford knew it marked him as hopelessly old-fashioned, but he insisted on using paper when doing paperwork. Maybe it was inefficient. Maybe it was an affectation. Well. He never claimed to be perfect.

He had in his hands the last sheet of paper that waited for him in his inbox. It was a request to requisition for… he squinted at the smudgy handwriting.

For a ‘big frikkin’ laser,’ and at the bottom was Steelbeak’s scratchy signature.

This request earned Bradford’s big DENIED stamp. Just like all the other identical requests Steelbeak had sent him.

Directly involving himself with FOWL’s day-to-day logistics was another affectation. But he had always been a bean counter and didn’t see that stopping any time soon. The abstraction and certainty that numbers provided was a comfort in the face of a chaotic world.

He placed the denied request in the outbox and with that, his day had ended. Bradford leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath.

And no sooner had he done so when the door to his office slid open and a little chaos showed up.

 _”Why do I have to tell him?”_ Heron said in a stage whisper at the threshold of his door.

 _”You’re less likely to get… vaporized or whatever?”_ That might be Agent Dee’s voice, if Bradford had to guess.

 _”I keep telling you all he doesn’t_ do _that. I wish he would.”_

“Heron,” Bradford said sternly from where he sat. “Do you have anything for me? More ancient literature to quote at me?”

Heron looked at him, then looked to her side, then she straightened up and walked into his office. “Actually I have that report you wanted.”

Bradford raised one eyebrow, clasped his hands in front of him and nodded. “Very well. I will review it tomorrow.”

“Splendid.” Heron said. She put the paper down on his desk, stepped back, and did not leave.

Bradford stared impassively. “Anything _else_ to report?”

“Ah, yes.” Heron looked sheepish. “Rockerduck has launched almost all our Eggheads into the sea. Shall I have a talk with the recruiting service and have them run another hiring campaign?”

“Rockerduck’s done no such thing,” Bradford said.

“Well he’s certainly done _something_ ,” said Heron. “I saw him prancing down the corridors like an absolute ninny. And he’s only ever that happy when he’s hurt someone who makes less money than him.”

“Do you lunatics honestly think I’d allow any of you to just jettison entire pieces of the base willy-nilly?”

“I mean sure as a perk —”

“No! Heron! I don’t! I overrode his request because all such orders have to be remotely approved by me first.”

“Oh,” Heron blinked. “That’s surprisingly well-thought, considering.”

“It’s only ‘well-thought’ if you aren’t a ridiculous evil caricature. At least someone in this organization has to be sane.” Bradford said, “not to say that you all don’t wear on me.” And the unexpected maudlin tone in his voice seemed to catch Heron off-guard.

“You knew about this little… Egghead gathering?” she said.

“I didn’t at first. But then I saw it had been arranged in advance and entered into the day’s reports,” Bradford said sullenly. “Which I _read_.”

“Devil in the details and all that,” said Heron.

“Hm. Just another day,” Bradford said. He peered past Black Heron. “I assume we haven’t all died from a reactor meltdown, Agent Dee?”

Gandra’s head poked out from the hallway. “Uh... no! Some dumbass held the coolant vents open with a rubber band. Nearly flooded the entire reactor core but the thing snapped just in time. That’s the big thump we all felt.”

“See to it that the person responsible for this negligence is disciplined, Agent Dee.”

“Well he was part of that Egghead gathering you approved so...” she stepped into the door frame and shrugged. “Isn’t that you?”

The silence that followed was filled by the electric hum of the facility around them.

Heron clapped her hands together. “Why, Director! You endangered the entire facility and our lives! Dare I say you’ve been... _reckless_? I am so proud of you.”

“They said it was a pizza party,” Bradford said. He could feel another headache start up.

“Yeah, about that?” Dee said. “The transport tube to the surface is clogged with pizza boxes and balls from the ball pit?”

Bradford groaned like the front door of a haunted house. “I don’t believe this. Get the Eggheads to clear it out.”

“Sure,” said Dee. “Still, we’re stuck here for the night. We get overtime, right?”

“It’s not the most ridiculous thing to happen, Bradford,” Heron said.

“And there’s still pizza,” Dee said. “Like. A lot. I don’t know if you’ve seen Rockerduck try to eat one, but it’s really, really funny.”

“Let’s just get through the night with no further incidents,” Bradford said.

“You’re one to talk,” said Heron.

“No but seriously, about that overtime,” said Dee.


End file.
